Sunday, March 9, 2014

Peek at My SUPER BUSY Week: ELA Style!

I am excited to be linking up with A Peek at My Week, the weekly linky party where you can share your plans for the upcoming week. Not only does writing this post force allow me to plan for the week, but I also love checking out the other posts to see what other bloggers are doing in the classroom.

I have a super busy week because we are supposed to get another significant snow storm on Wednesday, I am out for curriculum writing on Thursday, and on Friday, I will be working with the PBIS team all day. It's hard enough to leave one day of sub plans, but two days in a row is even harder.

A fun yet meaningful activity for students to complete with a sub is my Fix the Mistakes Around the Room activity. I have this activity already printed, laminated, and hung scattered around the room. The students keep asking to find the mistakes. Honestly, when are students excited to edit? I'm telling you, these around the room activities are AWESOME in the classroom. I have a wonderful Valentine's Day themed activity, a St. Patrick's Day activity, and a new one almost ready to post. I'm making more because my students beg me for them, so keep an eye out for a bundle!

I am eager to start a new novel this week with my students, which I am super excited about, Riding Freedom. This book is great because it isn't well known and not many students have ever heard of it. It is action packed and fits perfectly into our Revolutionaries unit! I will use the unit we created to accompany the book. This will make my sub plans simple. Although I actually LOVE reading the book with the students, if I HAVE to have a sub, it's something anyone can handle doing. The unit is also full of CCSS text dependent questions that force the students to go back into the text to find the answer. We are working on paraphrasing, so this will be a great practice to see where the students are independently.

We are currently working on idioms and showing our knowledge by incorporating idioms into our writing or quick writes. Luckily, I've been using Jivey's AMAZING Idiom Unit that has given me everything I could ever need to teach this type of figurative language. The students will be adding some foldables to their notebooks and having fun with an idiom center later this week too! (I will post more about this when it is done!)

Last week, I completed another lesson from Falling in Love with Close Reading, focusing on word choice, once again. This time it was close reading Sojourner Truth's speech. Have you ever done this?? The results were AMAZING, buttttttttttt I haven't had day 2 of the lesson yet. I am set to complete that on Wednesday and will then post more about the lesson as a whole!

Phew! I am exhausted just thinking about this week! In between all of this, we are starting an opinion piece titled My Favorite Restaurant! The students were supposed to be thinking of their favorite restaurant and why it was their favorite over the weekend. I can't wait to hear what they pick!

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Thank you for stopping by our blog. We are two Connecticut, small town, fourth grade teachers. We have each taught 4th grade for eight years and are passionate educators. We love this grade level and enjoy working together. We especially love finding and creating useful resources for our students and teacher friends. We love making teacher friends online so feel free to send us an email or leave us a comment.